Britsimon
Super Moderator
This is an interesting point. So by this rationale, does that mean the number of visas allocated to OC remains static year to year? Also worth pondering -- we've about 83% of the selectees compared to last year. Should that mean our highest CN is likely to be around 0.83*3000 = 2490?
In that case, by my estimate, the cutoff for next year will be almost spot on 1500, assuming the highest 2014 CN lay between 3000 and 3300, and we don't move past 1450.
D'oh!
My one ray of hope is that I'm making dodgy assumptions. That ray is provided by DV2013: they only took about 2150 selectees, but I read of case numbers up above 1700... and the region went current. What's changed about the allocation of CNs in 2014 to keep the final CN at 1450 out of 4200 odd selectees?
DV2013 isn't the oddball/screwup, DV2014 is.
When we first heard that selectees had gone from the "normal" 100k (105 in DC2013) to 140K in DV2014 we were puzzled, but pretty worried. Some (one) reasoned that new software was going to increase the rejection rate or perhaps affect the response rate - that didn't happen. For OC though there was a massive increase in selectees (by 100% over 2013 instead of the global 30% increase. I reasoned that the increase MUST have meant OC was going to see a large increase in quota. It appears that was incorrect too. In fact, the OC numbers for this year look like finishing very slightly above last year. So - we have all been whining and confused about how KCC have screwed up, but really the only screwup was inviting more selectees to believe they were getting a GC. In terms of issuing visas and filling the pot over a 12 month period I think final results will probably show KCC did a good job.
So yeah for OC particularly (where no special countries hit limits) you can assume that final numbers in DV2014 will signal final numbers in DV2015 (roughly). So - if we end up at 1450 (I am still hoping for an update to that) you should expect around 1450/1600 range next year. To get to 1700 or above (comparing to 1450 final) would take one or more of the following:
1. More non responses (unlikely unless something puts people off moving to the USA like economy issues or civil war)
2. More rejections (unlikely iof the rules such as education standards are unchanged)
3. Bigger quota for OC. (I dare not predict this again).